Lightning catches up with Thunderbird

Mozilla has made a beta of Lighting 1.0 available for download, giving users of its Thunderbird email package a more integrated way of working out what day it is.

The Lightning extension adds calendaring to Thunderbird, making the email package more of an alternative for those used to the likes of full fat Outlook.

But while Mozilla's email package got a make-over in the shape of Thunderbird 3 last month, a full compatible version of Lightning failed to make it out of the door.

That has been remedied with the release of Lightning 1.0 beta 1 for download. The developers promise "seamless integration" with Thunderbird 3.0.

More prosaically, the download should have improved stability, performance and memory consumption.

Users can also delight in tabbed views, and multiple alarms for a single event - unless they want to work in traditional Chinese, Slovenia, Swedish or Ukranian. Speakers of 37 other languages, including Frisian and our favourite, English, can rest easy. ®